Vol. 7, No. 2, Winter 2010, 327-335
www.ncsu.edu/project/acontracorriente
Review/Reseña
Jeffrey Bortz, Revolution within the Revolution: Cotton Textile
Workers and the Mexican Labor Regime, 1910-1923.
Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008.
Labor Regime Change in the Mexican Revolution
John Lear
University of Puget Sound
Histories of the Mexican Revolution long stressed rural movements
and featured armed peasants and military caudillos. By the time serious
labor histories emerged in the decade after 1968, they often fell within a
reigning revisionism that questioned the social character of the revolution
and saw labor’s participation as insignificant, defeated, or opportunist, and
ultimately subordinate to the cynical middle-class leadership that emerged
triumphant from the decade of military “rebellion.” In the last fifteen
years, the story of labor has changed. Soon after post-revisionist
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interpretations in the 1980s again embraced the social character of the
revolution, new studies of urban areas began to re-vision working people
as key actors of the revolution—different from peasants in their goals,
actions and trajectory, yet very much a part of the ongoing process of
challenge and consent that constituted the revolution and the postrevolutionary order.
Jeffrey Bortz’s study of textile workers in the revolution is a
welcome and important contribution to this new historiography. His
overarching claim, writ large in the title and repeated throughout, is that
between 1910 and 1923 textile workers were the vanguard of a workers’
revolution that transformed the factory labor regime (defined generally as
the social relations of work). In turn, he asserts, “the revolution within the
revolution is the missing link in Mexico’s modern history” (9), the source
of the gains of organized labor after 1917 and of its fundamental role in the
stability of post-revolutionary Mexico.
Other monographs in English have addressed the mobilization of
textile workers, but usually as part of a broader study of a regional or
national working class; the literature in Spanish is more abundant, but
usually focused on a particular region, factory or moment, such as the 1911
textile strike and the resulting industry-wide agreement. No study of
textile workers to date is as sweeping and systematic in its coverage,
analysis and broader claims. And while this book draws from an ambitious
variety of national, state and municipal archives, it is a very assignable
length, well-organized and written in vigorous and often elegant prose.
A national focus on textile workers makes sense and is long
overdue. As the author shows in chapter two, cotton textiles constituted
Mexico’s largest and most advanced factory industry, expanding rapidly in
the late 19th century along a corridor from Mexico City to Puebla/Atlixco to
Orizaba,
largely
on
the
initiative
of
French-
and
Spanish-born
entrepreneurs. By 1907, the sector employed 33,000 workers—a drop in
the bucket of Mexico’s mostly rural population, but by far the largest single
sector of the industrial and urban working class. Some 140 mills employed
from 22 to 2700 workers, completely dominating mill towns like Orizaba
and forming a substantial minority around Puebla and the Federal
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329
District. Chapter three unravels the “layered communities” formed by
workers around class, skill level, gender, family and nationality. Bortz
argues that textile workers developed a notion of social class and
community that above all revolved around the shop floor. Thus their
primary goal during the revolution was “to change the conditions and
social relations of work, leaving most of the larger society to itself” (82).
This assertion explains the book’s limited attention to the broader working
class community, gendered relations, or the specific political activities of
textile workers, beyond involving the state in mediating factory relations.
It also highlights an aspect of the textile workers’ experience of the
revolution that the author does not address directly: that workers in
general and textile workers in particular did not participate significantly,
as individuals or collectives, in the armed uprisings and military
mobilizations of the revolution.
The narrative of this book is closely tied to the December 1911
textile strike, which the title of chapter three identities as “the beginning of
the workers’ revolution.” In the best account to date, Bortz makes a strong
case for the importance of a textile strike that quickly became national, led
to state-mediated meetings of textile owners and workers, and issued in an
agreement that would ultimately change relations between textile workers,
owners and the state. Other scholars have emphasized the limited material
gains (shorter hours and slightly higher, more uniform wages), the
continuance of authoritarian shop floor rules, the refusal of factory owners
to recognize or meet directly with workers’ organizations, and the
voluntary and uneven nature of the implementation of the accord. Bortz
acknowledges the reformist demands and even more modest outcomes,
but emphasizes the important precedent of state mediation, and
convincingly argues that the textile workers’ strike and the settlement
cracked open the edifice of owners’ and managers’ traditional authority.
Chapter five provides a more general narrative of the widening of
that crack, the continual assertions and gains by workers during the years
of greatest fighting (1912-1916). The textile convention and the virtual
collapse of the state that followed the overthrow of Madero allowed textile
workers to move from the “laborite” victory of the textile convention to a
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more radical rebellion in the workplace, strengthening their organizations,
challenging management over daily tasks, hiring and firings, and striking
for higher wages or to remove abusive foremen and supervisors. At the
same time, Constitutionalist military commanders, engaged in a civil war
with the Convention forces of Villa and Zapata, promulgated a series of
regional and national labor decrees in 1914 and 1915 that acceded to labor
demands while trying to contain them.
Chapter six backs up and moves forward to trace the emergence of
a body of labor laws and institutions that emerged between 1910 and 1923,
including the formation of the Labor Department in 1911, the textile
agreement in 1912, military labor decrees, the labor guarantees of Article
123 of the 1917 Constitution, tripartite Juntas de Conciliación y Arbitraje,
and a variety of state labor codes, culminating in that of Puebla, which
took control over the hiring of workers from owners and gave it to unions.
The following, parallel chapter traces the development of unions over the
same period. While earlier chapters refer uniformly to textile workers’
organizations as unions, chapter seven clarifies the transition from a
variety of precarious organizations (mutual aid societies, factory-based
mesas directivas and a national Comité Central set up by the Labor
Department, and agrupaciones de resistencia) to de facto and, after 1917,
de jure unions (sindicatos), recognized and regulated by the state and
forced upon owners. The growing interventions of military elites and the
post-revolutionary state, which “put the state in the middle of the laborcapital conflict” (127), are shown to be responses to the continuous and
growing challenges of workers and their organizations.
The final two chapters summarize the accomplishments and limits
of textile workers’ transformation of the labor regime in the period of early
institutionalization from 1917-1923. One pattern is the growing use by
workers of violence as a method of contesting the authority of
management. Multiple examples show workers using knives, guns and
even dynamite to assert themselves within the factory, a reflection of the
broader violence of the revolution up to 1917, as well as the rapid shift of
power within the factory toward workers after 1917. Another pattern is the
creation of hierarchical union structures with direct ties to the state. With
Labor Regime Change in the Mexican Revolution
331
the emergence of the semi-official CROM labor federation, union directedviolence often settled differences between those affiliated with the
dominant CROM and those tied to anarchist or company unions. From
1920, power within unions began to shift from the rank and file to
increasingly powerful leaders with ties to regional and national federations
and close alliances to local, state and federal government, epitomized by
the role of Luis Morones as head of the CROM, the Labor Party, and
eventually the Ministry of Industry, Commerce and Labor. The result was a
union hierarchy that echoed traditional patron-client relations and
emphasized discipline and loyalty among workers. At the same time, Bortz
shows that the use of violence and the consolidation of hierarchical unions
were compatible with “the principal goal of the worker’s revolution:
gaining control over the shop floor” (181). Perhaps the most telling sign of
the owners’ loss of control of the shop floor was pervasive union control
over firings—removing an abusive foreman or preventing the firing of a
worker—and eventually control over hiring (in Puebla from 1921, and
throughout the textile industry after 1927). Bortz notes Gregory Crider’s
argument that control over the shop floor and its attendant tasks of
discipline and loyalty may have simply passed from abusive, paternalistic
owners to analogous union leaders; but he counters that most workers
probably preferred to cede such decisions to leaders who shared their
origins and values than to the owners. And unions, in alliance with the
state, ultimately helped deliver significant improvements in wages, hours,
health care throughout the 1930s and 1940s, as the author has shown in
much of his earlier scholarship.
How far did this workers’ revolution go? Bortz makes clear that
without the national revolution and its attendant decline in owners’
monopoly of force, there would not have been a workers’ revolution.
Similarly, from the beginning textile unions relied on the state or
revolutionary leaders for mediation with capital, just as the new state came
to rely on workers for political support. As workers asserted themselves on
the shop floor, their unions recreated traditional hierarchies based on skill
and patronage. Finally, while textile workers never lost sight of their goal
of control over the shop floor, at no point did they contest the issue of
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ownership of the means of production. Unions controlled the inside while
owners controlled the outside. In spite of these limits, Bortz argues
convincingly that the situation of textile workers in 1923 was dramatically
better than it had been in 1910, particularly in terms of material benefits
and union control over the shop floor, and that this outcome was largely a
product of the workers’ own making.
While the transformation of the labor regime in textile factories is
dramatic evidence of the agency of workers in a genuine social revolution,
his provocative use of the term “workers’ revolution” and his claim that
“the one actor ignored by historians [of the revolution] has been the
winner, the industrial working class” (2) raise some caveats. For example,
Bortz makes the startling if plausible claim that “in no other twentiethcentury revolution—with the possible exceptions of Bolivia and Spain—did
unions play such a central role.” Accepting his exclusion of the Russian
revolution, where workers organizations were led by the Bolshevik Party
from the start, a case could made for an equally dramatic, union-led
transformation of the labor regime in Peronist Argentina (see Daniel
James), or the far more radical one in Allende’s Chile (see Peter Winn).1
Both occurred much later, in the absence of armed revolution, and were
shorter-lived, particularly in Chile, but they do help fit Mexico’s labor
regime in comparative perspective.
Bortz calls textile workers the “vanguard of the workers’
revolution” (5). Textile workers were focused on shop floor issues and their
own communities during the revolution and so the focus of this book on
them makes sense. But briefly considering textile workers in relation to
peasants and workers in other sectors would help enforce his ambitious
claims. At no point does the author suggest that the workers’ revolution
fueled the larger one, or could have happened without the context of the
national revolution, but a more direct contrast with “revolutionary
peasants,” with their assumption of arms, their direct attack on the system
Daniel James, Resistance and Integration: Peronism and the Argentine
Working Class, 1946-1976 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); Peter
Winn, Weavers of Revolution: The Yarur Workers and Chile's Road to Socialism
(New York: Oxford University Press, 1989).
1
Labor Regime Change in the Mexican Revolution
333
of private property, and their frequent attacks on the state and the
triumphant middle-class leadership of the revolution makes for a
suggestive comparison.
Perhaps a more reasonable concern is that the claims to the
primacy of textile workers eclipses the concurrent mobilization of workers
in other economic sectors, such as mining and oil workers, electricians,
transport workers and the variety of skilled and unskilled workers who
serviced the urban economy (here I should confess, my own work on the
working class of Mexico City during the revolution). Many groups of
workers—and not just the anarchist Casa del Obrero Mundial and the Red
Battalions who took up arms on behalf of the Constitutionalists—more
directly challenged owners and maintained a greater degree of autonomy
from the state and generals. The issue is not simply which group of
workers was more “revolutionary” or more strategic, but rather that the
transformation of the national labor regime was the result of shared and
differing actions of a large and diverse working class, as well as the related
reactions of owners, politicians and generals. A book about textile workers
need not be a book about all workers, but bold claims about a vanguard of
the workers’ revolution do beg a more explicit comparison.
In his claims of novelty, Bortz is directly or indirectly dismissive of
a fairly substantial body of recent working class history. In the
introduction, he lumps recent labor history with Ramon Ruiz’s 1976
revisionist argument that workers failed to achieve their goals and that any
benefits they received were handed down from above: “Twenty-five years
later, scholars still claimed that workers benefited from the revolution only
because they ‘encountered revolutionary leaders willing to regulate by
decree many of the insecurities of work’” (2). Full disclosure: the words of
the citation are mine, but the argument he associates with it is not. That
workers encountered sympathetic revolutionary leaders is the subject of
half of Bortz’s book, but no recent scholar of Mexican labor would argue
that revolutionary leaders were the “only” or even the primary reason for
workers’ gains after 1917. For the most part, Revolution within the
Revolution fits well within the pattern of recent scholarship (a few
examples are monographs by William French, Leticia Gamboa Ojeda,
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Jocelyn Olcott, Susie Porter, Myrna Santiago, Michael Snodgrass, and
Andrew Wood) that emphasizes the agency of workingmen and women
during and after the revolution. The main difference is that these scholars
put greater stress on the transformations of other “vanguards,” on the
defeats as well as the victories of specific rank and file movements, and on
the negotiated give-and-take between subordinate groups and postrevolutionary elites that characterizes much of the post-revisionist
literature.
At the same time, Bortz’s book could have benefited from some of
the gendered and cultural turns of recent labor history. Chapter three
includes an interesting discussion of the gendered, largely male
construction of the layered communities of textile workers. Table 3.3
indicates that women were a mere 16 percent of adult textile workers in
1927, and largely segregated into low skilled and low paying positions. And
then this small female minority largely disappears from the narrative of
the “man’s world” of the shop floor, in spite of two suggestive questions
about women’s actions and working conditions during the revolution that
are mostly left pending (62). Susie Porter’s research on women workers in
Mexico City demonstrates how the revolution opened up discursive and
political spaces within which women could formulate their demands in
new terms. At the same time, she shows how new labor laws and maledominated labor unions ultimately contributed to the declining percentage
of women in the Mexico City workforce after 1917, particularly in factory
settings. An example from my own research shows that women fell from
24 percent of workers in 1918 in one of Mexico City’s largest textile
factories, San Antonio Abad, to 14 percent in 1924. If this decline holds
nationally for textile workers, it would suggest a greater presence of
women in textile factories in 1910 than in 1927. Examining the power
relations mediated by changing discourses of gender might further his
argument that the revolution on the shop floor ultimately reinforced
aspects of traditional hierarchies, while forcing him to consider the
revolution of working people beyond the shop floor. In spite of the
increasing radicalization of textile workers’ actions and their dramatic
transformation of the labor regime, they seem little affected in this account
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335
by the ideas and language of the revolution itself, rarely invoking the
revolution or any expanded view of citizenship in their challenge to
owners’ authority or appeals to political authority. Is this the result of the
fixed gaze of workers on specific issues of wages, hours and shop floor
control (while “leaving most of the larger society to itself”), or will such a
discursive analysis simply have to await future cultural historians who can
build upon Bortz’s solid foundation?
These caveats may be unrealistic. Among the strengths of this fine
book are its innovative blending of carefully researched social history with
a new institutional history framework, its tight organization and
assignable length, and the very boldness of the author’s assertions. If the
focus on the transformation of the textile labor regime at times seems
narrow, it is that very focus that allows him to argue convincingly that
textile workers staged a revolution within a revolution. And the “narrow”
focus allows the author to fill a big hole in the history of Mexico’s working
people. His final phrase about the new labor regime that textile workers
created can be extended to this important book itself: “its strengths were
its limits and its limits were its strengths” (201).